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I recently did a presentation at the South West VMUG on VMware vSphere community (free) health check options. In my presentation I covered some of the options available out there at the moment such as:

vCheck (vSphere plugins)

vGhetto health check script

Miscellaneous PowerCLI / PowerShell options

Starting off the session in style – Intro in mspaint, running under Windows 3.1

The second half of my presentation I dived into a live PowerCLI and PowerShell demo where I demonstrated some PowerCLI basics to get any kind of information out of your vSphere environment using some of the core cmdlets. I demonstrated use of the core PowerCLI cmdlets used for retrieving VM, Host and Datastore information, how to use the pipeline in PowerShell, and taking a look at all properties on any PS object using the Get-Member cmdlet on the pipeline.

After covering these basics, I took a blank vCheck plugin template, and showed how easy it is to create your own custom plugins for vCheck should you find that the existing plugins don’t cover everything you need.

I’ve got a link to download the slides for the presentation below, and hopefully I’ll be able to find a recording of the PowerCLI / PowerShell live demo I did to attach to this post as a follow up.